​Happy March kindergarten families!

I hope you all enjoyed a wonderful March break last week and that you are looking ahead to the spring weather that will soon be upon us.  We have been working very hard together over the past several weeks.  Below are some of the outcomes we have been focusing on together.  Please continue working at home on your child's letters, sounds, sight words and home reading as well.  Feel free to have your child read their take home books or they can read on Raz kids. Students can choose to listen to reading on Raz kids but it would also be very beneficial for them to use this site to read these books independently as well.  Please encourage them to use the reading strategies we have learned this year to solve tricky words.  We have worked on the following reading strategies:

a) Eagle Eye - use the pictures to help figure out the tricky word

b) Lips the Fish - look at the beginning sound of the tricky word to get a clue

c) Stretchy Snake - stretch out each sound slowly and then blend the sounds back together

d) Chunky Monkey - look for a small, but familiar chunk inside the tricky word.  It could be a sight word (ex. handle has the word AND inside it) or it could be a digraph (chop has the digraph CH)

e) Skippy Frog - skip over the tricky word and read to the end of the sentence and then go back to the beginning and see if you can now use the context of the sentence to figure out unknown word.

f) Careful Caterpillar - Look very carefully at the entire word.  Take your time.

Literacy

In addition to the reading strategies mentioned above, we have also been working on the following skills:

• ​learning new sight words
• phonological skills of beginning and ending sounds
•  retelling the events of stories we are reading 
• In writing, we have been focusing very carefully on starting our sentences with capital letters, putting a stop mark at the end, leaving spaces between words and having our sentence match our picture.  
  

Math

In math, we have been concentrating on subitizing dots cards and five and ten frames.  (This means looking at a group of dots and knowing automatically how many dots there are.)  We have also been focusing on counting on and back from any number between 1 and 10 and have begun working on combinations of numbers between 5 and 10.  

Ideas to try at home:

a) While setting the table or playing with toys, ask your child to count a certain number of objects between 1 and 10.  Then, add on a few more items and ask your child to count on from the number of items they had initially.  Do not go back to 1 and count but count on from original number.  You can do the same thing as well, but remove toys and have your child count back from the original number.

b) Play any game that requires the use of a dice to help your child with subitizing (knowing automatically how many dots are on the dice).  To give your child a challenge, use two dice and have your child count on from the largest number rolled on the dice.  For example, if your child rolls a 5 and 4, have your child find the largest number on the dice (5) and count on from there,  5, 6, 7, 8, 9.  So, rolling a 5 and 4 equals 9 and they have practiced counting on.  Do not have them start at 1 and count all 9 dots, but rather start at the largest number rolled and count on.

c) Use a deck of cards and play War, Go Fish etc... Any type of game that encourages number recognition and the comparison of numbers is beneficial.  

Report Cards

Report Cards go out April 4th and parent teacher interviews will be held following this.  Please send back the form that was sent home this week, indicating your preferred times for parent teacher interviews.